Saint James Way: The Coastal Route

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The northernmost of the routes
to Santiago, the coastal route, winds trough the
green marine landscape that bathes the Cantabrian
Sea (as the Bay of Biscay is known
locally) and has one of the stopping-off stages in the city and port of Gijón.

This pilgrim's trail forms
part of the collection of itineraries to Saint James tomb and is known by the
name of the northern route, of which the route between Oviedo and Santiago de
Compostela also form part, as does the detour from León to Oviedo, a branch
that links up the coastal route with the "French route" that traverses the
Castilian plateau.

These routes were travelled
by pilgrims of medieval and modern times. They wished to prostrate themselves
before the tomb of the apostle and venerate in Oviedo,
the holy city on the northern route, the image of the Saviour (13th
century) and the Ark
or relics deposited in the Cámara Santa (Holy Chamber) in the basilica built by
Alfonso II the Chaste (791-842) in this same city. At the end of the 11th
century, the exceptional riches of the reliquary and oral propagation of the
miracles and legends of the Saviour brought to Asturias one of the routes to
Santiago de Compostela, giving rise to well-known late-medieval popular verse
that went "Quien va a Santiago y no a San Salvador, visita al criado y deja al
Señor" (Whoever goes to Santiago and not to San Salvador, visits the servant
but not the Lord).

The coastal route starts out in
Irún (Guipúzcoa), traverses the coastal region of the Basque Country, Cantabria
and Asturias, crossing the dividing line with Galicia of the Eo Estuary to then
enter Mondoñedo in the quest for Compostela. This northern front, under the
threat or pirate Muslim and Norman raiders for centuries, started to become
established as a pilgrims' route during the 12th-13th
centuries under the aegis of the new townships founded by the Castilian
monarchs and thanks to the proliferation of pilgrims who made their way here by
sea and of coastal navigation. In its Asturian stretch, its visits monumental
towns such as Llanes, Ribadesella, Villaviciosa, Gijón, Avilés, Luarca or
Castropol; it goes by medieval monasteries such as those of San Salvador de
Celorio and San Antolín de Bedón, in Llanes, and San Salvador de Valdediós, in
Villaviciosa, Romanesque churches (San Juan de Amandi, in Villaviciosa, and San
Nicolás de Bari or Santo Tomás de Canterbury, in Aviles) and Pre-Romanesque
temples such as that of Valdediós; it also unhearths remains of the roman past
of the civitas of Gijón. In the
borough of Villaviciosa, a fork in the route leads to Oviedo.

All along the Asturian
coastal route, the pilgrims to Santiago
left a wealth of archaeological and documental evidence, as well as eloquent
place names that make reference to the coastal "French route". From the 14th
century onward, hospital institutions proliferated which were to provide
assistance to poor pilgrims right up until the 19th century, a fine
example of which is the hospital
of Nuestra Señora de los
Remedios in Gijón, which operated in the 15th century.

Other reports give a name to
the pilgrims who passed through Asturias
and confirm that the coastal route was highly transited during the Modern Age,
despite the fact that the way was neither, easy or comfortable. Pilgrims had to
cross wide estuaries and river courses (Deva, Sella, Nalón, Navia and Eo) in
boats. As did a tailor from Picardy, Guillermo Manier, who describes the boat
crossing of the Eo Estuary in 1726 as "one of the most dangerous and fearful
place in all of Spain", to which he adds, "you see the sea waves shoot up into
the air against one another (â€¦) which makes you frightfully afraid, that you
believe yourself to have perished at all times".

The northern route, far from
the overcrowding that the French route currently suffers, continues to be an
experience in solitude and in union with a rugged fecund nature of colourful
scenery: the green, the ochre and the chestnut-coloured forest in which
pilgrims immerse themselves, the indigo of the rough Cantabrian Sea,
and the gold of its sandy beaches. Above the pilgrims' heads, a sky of a
thousand and one hues, from stormy grey to luminous blue; before their eyes,
horizons of mountains tops and peaks.